He did discover the service mode (Ctrl+Tab Ctrl+Enter) where a challenge is presented and a proper answer can unlock the machine when you lost the password, but he did not have the tool (most probably proprietary service tool made by Toshiba) to get the proper answer. Sergiusz tried all the clever tricks with batteries and jumpers, but none worked. It had a BIOS password set up, unknown to the current owner. Someone came to Sergiusz “q3k” Bazański asking for help in unlocking it. We’ll do our best to describe what we can, but there will be moments when we can’t even pretend to understand what was happening – please refer to the slides/Hackaday entry or try to decrypt the recorded presentation. There’s also a partial project log – in English as well. There are also slides – this time in English, from Recon 2017 – but no recording.
There is a recording, published yesterday, but it’s encrypted in Polish. We had the pleasure to watch this talk live at Security PWNing conference in 2017 in Warsaw. There will be plenty of hardware hacking, reverse engineering and perseverance. This is a great story about hacking a BIOS-level locked Toshiba laptop.
